A PEOPLE ADRIFT:
THE CRISIS OF THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH IN
AMERICABy Peter SteinfelsSimon & Schuster, 416 pages, $26

Moderate manifesto for churchs future

Steinfels spurns right and left rigidity in U.S. Catholicism

Reviewed by DAVID OBRIEN

In May, the University of Notre Dame awarded its Laetare Medal to Peter
and Margaret OBrien (Peggy) Steinfels. The medal has
been worn only by men and women whose genius has ennobled the arts and
sciences, illustrated the ideals of the church and enriched the heritage of
humanity.

Peggy, who succeeded Peter as editor of Commonweal magazine in
1988 and served in that position until her retirement this past January, is one
of the nations best-known Catholic leaders. She appears regularly in the
national media to comment on Catholic affairs. Peter has served as senior
religion writer and currently writes a biweekly column for The New York
Times. In recent years he has taught at Notre Dame and Georgetown while his
continuing status with the Times has gained him entrée to the
major events of recent religious history. A People Adrift: The Crisis of the
Roman Catholic Church in America, his second book, is dedicated to his
wife, with whom I have been thrashing out these matters since we were
17.

These personal notes are important because the Steinfels public
leadership all but guarantees that this book will receive a lot of attention.
Peter Steinfels is uniquely qualified by his experience, his access to sources
and his journalists professionalism to survey the state of contemporary
American Catholicism. Those same qualifications ensure that his book will be
noticed by the mainstream media and examined eagerly by all shades of Catholic
opinion.

The books importance will be further enhanced by the
Steinfels success in negotiating Catholicisms culture wars.
Liberals regard them as increasingly conservative, but most conservatives
denounce them as liberals. Bishops of all sorts consult them with confidence.
They claim the center in most Catholic debates, criticizing factionalism and
distancing themselves from too eager reformers as quickly as from papal and
doctrinal fundamentalists. At the start of this book, Peter Steinfels
characteristically positions himself for the arguments to come. First he
asserts his deep Catholic roots, lest there be any doubt of the priority of
Catholic over American as he approaches his subject: the Roman Catholic
church in America. Indeed he rejects what he takes to be the widespread
assumption behind so many media accounts of the church in crisis:
that Catholicism must modernize, become up to date, adjust to America or
fall by the wayside. While meaningful faith must find some
plausible fit with its cultural surroundings, these modernizing
assumptions mask unexamined beliefs about what the times require, usually
along the lines of accommodation to secular worldviews. This language
echoes the anti-Americanist worries of neoconservative Catholics, but Steinfels
quickly adds that he does not accept the opposite assumption that only
religious groups that define themselves sharply and stubbornly in opposition to
the prevailing culture are destined to flourish.

Such plague-on-both-your-houses moderation, above factions, detached
from ecclesiastical politics, seems to some dangerously dispassionate, even
wishy-washy. Moderates are on the defensive, pressured to clarify their
Catholic loyalties and resistance to cultural accommodation. These pressures
continue to increase as the center of gravity in the church keeps shifting to
the right. But Steinfels is a robust Catholic, and with this book he tries to
mount a middle-of-the-road offensive. His formation in the energetic world of
postwar Chicago Catholicism and his long experience of New Yorks
conflicted cultural politics give Steinfels a self-confidence rare among
Catholic moderates. Indeed, A People Adrift comes across as a
contentious manifesto of the middle expressing its authors deeply felt
concern for the unity and integrity of his endangered church. This is a book
with a purpose: to counter ideological polarization and institutional paralysis
by revitalizing the moderate, pastorally inclined Catholic center best
exemplified by the books iconic hero, the late Cardinal Joseph
Bernardin.

The book opens with Bernardins dramatic 1996 Chicago funeral, the
moving narrative punctuated by autobiographical memories of Steinfels
youthful formation, and romance, in Chicagos flourishing Catholic
subculture. Steinfels locates the centerpiece of Bernardins legacy in the
Catholic Common Ground Initiative, the cardinals effort to reverse
growing divisions and enlist contending Catholic factions in dialogue in order
to unite the American church in its mission of service. The cardinals
proposal, which came days before announcement of the recurrence of his cancer,
was immediately and harshly rejected by four of his brother cardinals. The most
dramatic moment in the funeral came when the homilist said common ground
is sacred ground and the assembled throng exploded with applause that the
cardinals critics felt compelled to join.

Steinfels explores the later experience of the Initiative. The
critics ability to turn this appeal for dialogue about differences into a
left-of-center project changed the framework of Catholic discourse. Aggressive
conservatives, with backing from the Vatican and its most devoted acolytes in
the United States, successfully portrayed moderate centrists as dangerous
liberals, lacking in fidelity to the Vatican and sliding down a slippery slope
of unending compromise with dissent within the church and secularism and
religious indifference without. With Bernardins death, the appointment of
safe men as bishops, the erosion of national organizations of priests and
religious, and the failure of the growing number of lay ministers to organize,
such views came to dominate Catholic institutional politics.

Peter Steinfels-- Hag Manoogian

Steinfels agrees with conservatives that the American church is
clearly at risk of a soft slide into a kind of nominal
Catholicism. But to understand what is happening he believes one must
look beyond the usual litany of abrasive issues of sexuality and gender to
worship, spiritual life, religious education and most of all
leadership. He argues that liberals and conservatives in the church,
frozen into positions formed years ago, ignore basic pastoral challenges. The
next 10 to 20 years will be a period of unusual opportunity, and peril, because
of two massive transitions. One is generational, as the Vatican II
generation gives way to those now in their 20s and 30s, who have little
understanding of traditional faith. Steinfels goes so far as to call them
religious blanks. The second transition is from clergy to laity.
Across the board, from institutions of health care and social services to
schools to parishes, fewer priests and religious mean that lay people must play
a dominant role in the life and work of the future church.

To face the challenges that come with these transitions, the church must
act. Instead of a people adrift, American Catholics must recover a
sense of shared responsibility for the future of their church. A people
is not a population. A people is not an undifferentiated mass but a group with
a sense of itself, a collective memory, a solidarity, an anticipated destiny,
all of which must be preserved in formulas, rituals, written or recited epics,
lines of authority, prescribed and proscribed behaviors. Instead of
culture wars there must be common ground, achieved in part through leadership,
especially from the bishops. But they will need a lot of help, and Steinfels
ends the book with a stirring call to action directed at Catholics in positions
of ministry, service and responsibility, from parish councils to diocesan
commissions to theological research centers.

From this Bernardin center Steinfels takes up:

The sex abuse crisis. As shocked and angry as others, Steinfels
laments the absence of leadership among the bishops and the loss of perspective
on the part of their critics. He fears the scandal will accelerate already
evident tendencies toward religious individualism, undermining Catholic
solidarity and Catholic institutions.

Catholics and politics. Here he assesses the increasing independence
of Catholic voters and the policy activism of the hierarchy, with special
attention to the impact of the abortion question. As that issue came to define
Catholic political integrity, tensions grew between church leaders and many
Catholic politicians. Followers of Bernardins seamless
garment of pro-life positions find themselves politically homeless. Worst
of all is information from a Commonweal cosponsored research project
suggesting that young Catholic men tend to vote Republican because they like
GOP economic policies while younger women support the Democrats in part because
of that partys unequivocal support for choice.

Liturgy and pastoral care. Worship and parish life are basic to
American religion but few Catholic leaders are facing the challenges posed by
too few priests, dull Masses and homilies, and lack of understanding of
sacramentality. This is his most common ground chapter as he writes
sympathetically of the dedication of liturgical reformers while listening to
their critics with respect. He speaks clearly, but modestly, of the
shortcomings of liturgical music. Readers will be heartened by his detailed
description of Bishop Kenneth Unteners leadership in improving
sacramental and pastoral practice in his diocese of Saginaw, Mich. Steinfels
celebrates the appearance of deacons and thousands of lay ministers, but he
notes the unevenness of shared responsibility among parishioners and their
ministers, and, with considerable passion, he urges more research on matters of
liturgy and parish life.

Catholic institutions of health care, social services and higher
education. Here Steinfels worries about loss of Catholic identity consequent on
professionalization, various forms of independent incorporation, and the
complex webs of responsibility arising from public-private partnerships. He
warns the bishops against imposing damaging new juridical controls but he urges
leaders of these institutions to take bold steps in hiring and training staffs
sympathetic to Catholic teaching.

School- and parish-based religious education. Schools work, parish
religious education struggles, and the church badly needs to find better ways
to share the faith across the generations. In this chapter he also takes up
theology, noting the tensions between theologians and the hierarchy. He worries
that theology has become too academic, too detached from the nuts and
bolts of Catholic pastoral life.

Sex and the female church. In perhaps his best chapter,
Steinfels takes up the most abrasive issues with attention to their pastoral
dimensions. The present emphasis on orthodoxy in these areas he refers to as a
form of Catholic fundamentalism. He is particularly concerned that his church
find ways to affirm the role of women and ensure their place in all areas of
church decision making, even as the ordination debate continues.

Bishops. Strong bishops are essential to genuine Catholicism and many
today provide excellent local leadership, but as a group they are most
responsible for the adrift quality of American Catholic life. They
have failed to speak up for the needs of the American church in dealing with
Rome, they have not faced the crucial pastoral challenges before the American
church, and they have left a vacuum that inhibits the kind of decisive action
badly needed if the American church is to avoid irreversible
decline and take on the work of thoroughgoing transformation
required by the times.

In all these areas Steinfels does not offer even a brief history, nor
does he provide a comprehensive review of current debates. Instead he offers an
argument-about-the-arguments taking place in each area of Catholic life. For
example, he understands why women are upset with their church though he is not
sure Catholic feminists always speak for the majority of Catholic women. He
understands why the hierarchy is anxious about feminist claims, and he
apparently thinks that Catholic feminism is endangered by groups that reject
the sacraments and the authority of the hierarchy. Still, he thinks the church
would do well to affirm women as ministers, invite them to ordination as
permanent deacons, keep open possibilities for change and meanwhile ensure that
women have a place at the table when decisions are made.

In the end Steinfels offers two major arguments about the crisis of the
American church.

First, the basic posture of dialogue between Catholicism and modernity,
once identified with liberal Catholicism, was moved by Vatican II and by the
imperatives of history to the center of Catholic life. Dialogue is not only
about dealing with others; it is also about reconciling conflicting claims
within the church and within the life of most Catholics. How do people who are
both Catholic and American, at this point in history, integrate their
experience of religion and culture, the demands of citizenship and
discipleship? This is the pastoral imperative of informed dialogue that the
self-defined defenders of orthodoxy too often ignore. But, Steinfels insists,
dialogue is not accommodation, as reformers often imply. Catholicism requires
its own distinctive identity. Catholics must know their faith if they are to be
good dialogue partners. Enthusiastic projects of reform often place the
integrity of the church at risk and weaken the distinctive identity of Catholic
institutions and of Catholics themselves. Steinfels thus shares many
conservative reservations about post-Vatican II reforms of the liturgy, church
architecture and religious education. He is critical of Catholic institutions,
especially Catholic colleges and universities, for risking Catholic identity in
their headlong quest for professional excellence and public prestige.

Unlike conservative critics of the contemporary church, however,
Steinfels does not beat up on ministers in the trenches. He admires what
practitioners from theologians to advocates for the poor and pastoral musicians
have attempted. At the same time he believes theology is now overly academic,
liturgy and music are dull, parish religious education has failed, and social
justice and peace activism is plagued by political correctness.

Commentary on justice and peace work comes mainly in asides: These are
not areas he considers at any length. That is unfortunate because one
reasonable proposal for reinvigorating the Catholic community has been to
moderate voices on contentious issues by placing them in the context of the
churchs mission to serve the poor and, through justice-seeking and
peacemaking, to offer a compelling witness to the dignity and unity of the
human family.

Despite his reservations about the products of renewal, Steinfels wants
no part of the rights agenda. He condemns the bishops subservience
to the Vatican, he sharply critiques simplistic restorationism in liturgy,
catechetics and ministry, and he rejects the control implicit in requiring
official mandates for theological scholars and teachers. He affirms the
inevitable passing of leadership from clergy to laity, and he insists that
revolutionary changes in the role of women in society make untenable age-old
Catholic assumptions. In fact, when Steinfels gets around to recommending
concrete changes, he endorses such things as lay ministry, pastoral moderation
on sexual ethics, the consistent ethic of life, and shared responsibility in
church governance, all ideas dear to supporters of Vatican II renewal and
reform. When the focus is on the nuts and bolts of Catholic
practice, as it is here, rather than on ideas about orthodoxy and dissent, then
change is a matter of fact, not interpretation, and creative and faithful
adaptation is not an option but a pastoral imperative.

Second, Steinfels argues that almost every problem comes back to
leadership. The sex abuse crisis saw the bishops drift without a leader.
Priests generally are not providing the kind of leadership needed by a new
church more dependent on lay personnel. College and university presidents, and
to a lesser degree leaders in Catholic health care and social services, allow
Catholic identity and mission to erode as they settle for meaningless slogans
and avoid hard decisions about hiring, training and commitment. The kind
of leadership needed to steer the American Catholic church here through its
current changes must reemphasize practical skills, pastoral results, empirical
measures, organizational effectiveness. The road to a mobilized middle,
no longer defensive about its fidelity, lies through the concrete requirements
of parishes, apostolic movements and institutions that shape, sustain and
express the faith of the Catholic people.

If there is a fault in this book, so rich in information and insight, it
is a surprising lack of historical focus, surprising because Steinfels is a
trained historian, and in person almost always offers a rich historical context
for his arguments. In this book, however, the trajectory of recent Catholic
history is quite conventional. Having confounded the assumptions and
expectations of early Americans that Catholicism was an outdated old
world remnant that would quickly die out in the atmosphere of American freedom,
Catholics after World War II achieved their historic objective of full
participation in American society while continuing, in record numbers, to
practice their faith. But history played a trick on Catholics at the moment of
this great achievement. The church had won vaunted place in the American
mainstream by standing apart, by celebrating and inculcating democratic and
conventional middle class values but in its own way, at arms length and within
its all embracing institutions. Now the defensiveness could be relaxed; the
permeable membrane with which the church guarded its members could be
officially dissolved. But hardly had the American Catholic church sunk back for
a few moments of comfort into the soft upholstery of acceptance than it was
thrown into turmoil. The throwing was done inside the church by Vatican
II and outside by the upsetting events of the dreaded
60s.

Well, not quite. The pre-1960s architects of modern American Catholicism
were hardly sinking back into the comfort of
acceptance. On the contrary, they were aggressively expanding the
Catholic institutional network in order to accompany their people on the long
awaited journey of liberation from poverty and powerlessness. In retrospect the
Catholic subculture was transformed less by pressure to adapt to secular
society than by the aspirations of Catholic families and leaders who came from
those families. Most thought that by working to develop a church that was fully
American and faithfully Catholic they would help their country fulfill its
democratic promise. They were Americanists, and Vatican II affirmed their
instinct that the church existed not for itself, standing apart,
but for the whole human family.

Peter Steinfels is not an Americanist. His Catholic people are adrift
and he hopes they can recover a sense of solidarity and possibility through the
reassertion of their distinctive faith and practice as Catholics. The
crisis of the Roman Catholic church in America will be resolved
constructively, he argues, only if church leaders can help their people avoid
the traps of religious indifferentism and cultural surrender built into
American religious freedom and pluralism. He is of course right: Sub-cultural
communities need to feel really good about themselves, and they need to meet
real needs if their institutions are to prosper. A more assertive presentation
of Catholic claims, a more enthusiastic affirmation of Catholic traditions,
better preaching, more engaging music, more energetic and intelligent
ministries, all these will surely help ensure Catholic unity, identity and
integrity.

But fulfillment of the promise of American Catholic life, an answer to
the question liberation for what? will require a love that extends
to the American people, of whom Catholics are, by heritage and choice, a part.
That is to say, to put it personally, that we Catholics must attend carefully
to the American parts of our church, and of ourselves.

David OBrien is director for the Center for Religion, Ethics and
Culture and the Loyola professor of Roman Catholic Studies at Holy Cross
College, Worcester, Mass.